


Kings of Bohemia

by Zagzagael



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-15
Updated: 2010-01-15
Packaged: 2017-10-06 07:39:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/51275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zagzagael/pseuds/Zagzagael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Serious spoilers through 5.10.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kings of Bohemia

_'And there is no peace  
No true release  
No secret place to crawl  
And there is no rest  
For the ones God blessed  
And he blessed you best of all' ~ R. Thompson_

 

Long fingers tented over his forehead, beneath the thick locks of his hair, his own touch anchoring him. One elbow on the dirty porcelain rim, breathing in mouthfuls of the stale bathroom air. He reached up to grab at the roll of toilet paper on the tank, spinning off a long loop of it and wiping his mouth, blowing his nose. He stood, shaky, tossed the wad of paper into the bowl and flushed the bile, the waste, the grief, and the fear away. The despair he kept, tucking it back down around his heart, an emotional pericardium.

He pressed himself against the wall, tilting his cheek into the grimy glass. God, Bobby was a shit housekeeper and the upstairs bathroom a testament to his domestic failures. The windowsill a fly graveyard complete with spider robbers and the discards of their silk-spun shrouded meals. He felt his upper lip curl away from his teeth and made quick, shallow-breathed ridiculous and non-binding deals with his stomach. Diversion. He dragged his gaze up and out, into the night-black yard, the twisted metal of broken, abandoned vehicles like something out of a nightmare. Other people's nightmares.

He refused to meet his own eyes in the blackened mirror above the sink, splashing cold water onto his face, not wanting to risk the asthmatic pipes wheezing the house awake if he tried to coax warmer water out of the faucet. He rubbed his face dry and then drank quickly from his cupped palm. Now he could breathe again through his nose and he flipped off the light switch and made his way back to the bedroom down the hall, back to where Dean would be lying in state. On his back, shallow breaths, eyes barely closed and, Sam knew, the inside of his lids playing this week's Feature Presentation, Jo and Ellen get blown to fucking Kingdom Come in technicolour.

He lay down on the other twin, less than three feet between him and his brother. He could reach out, reach over, towards....instead, he turned onto his side, pillowing his head onto his fists, pulling his legs up, curling himself around a forever emptiness, eyes slitted open to watch over Dean in the gloom cast by the hall light being left on, not accidentally. He didn't bother climbing into his bedroll, he wanted the chilly air of the tiny bedroom and his frozen guts to frost his flesh, wanted to tease his mind with thoughts of how ice burns and how fire burns and soon enough it would be a new day.

He was counting new days as though they were beads on an abacus, slide, slide, slide, pushing them over and waiting for them to add up to when Dean would be able smile again. Time, the great tranquillizer...

\-------------

"It's a god-damned job, Dean, that's what it is." Bobby's voice was gruff-familiar, but Sam could hear the grief lining it, not in silver but in black black black.

He nodded past his brother's silence and reached across the kitchen table for the scrap of paper. "We'll handle it, Bobby."

Dean was staring over at the refrigerator, an unreadable look on his face, but Sam was tired of perusing that old news anyway. It had been six days and five nights since Carthage and the colossal failure of the Colt....and....their collective abandonment of hope, sunk beneath waves of gore.

"Dean, we're leaving in the next hour." He said this as matter-of-factly as he could, standing and downing the last of the bitter coffee, walking to the sink and rinsing out the empty mug. He wanted his hands busy and full lest they betray him and reach out to offer an empty comfort. No one seemed to want Sam's hands on them, not any more, not for years, and he wondered if he was emotionally leprous.

He walked out of the room, hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans.

\-------------

His eyes were burning, screen glare and scrolling pages of information, sorting through it, held hostage until he could sort the piles, separate out the useless from the more useless. He bit hard and deep into the meat of his cheek. Dean had gone for beer and a long ride in his car. The familiar comfort of another motel room, another town, another hunt, anaesthetizing them. They had been shuffling through the past two days since leaving the asylum of Bobby's place, etherized patients motioning towards their phantom limbs, or worse than that, lobotomised screamers muffled.

Outside the shard-thin window, he heard the low rumble of the Impala's impressive dual exhaust, the metal screeching of the door opening, the satisfying clunk of it closing and he stared harder at the laptop, wishing wanting something he had no idea, no concept of what it was but it was something other than what he was living through. Dean stepped into the room, hip-leaning to close the door, setting the plastic convenience store bag down on the table beside the computer. Digging in deep for a bottle, then almost as an afterthought, pulling out two, popping the caps and swinging one by its neck over to Sam. He nodded his gratitude through a long pull at the beer, opening his throat, pouring it inside him. Numbing promise.

He kept staring at the useless screen, feeling like a blind man feels at Dean's movements through the room; rim-shooting the caps into the metal waste-basket, sipping then suckling the beer, settling himself onto the edge of one of the beds.

"I think it's a corpse eater," Sam said to the table, the laptop, the bottle, the bag, the room. Whispered it deadly to the universe, the unsympathetic cosmos.

"Yeah?" Dean's voice was barely audible. Sam listened as Dean cleared his throat. "Super."

And then.

Sam breathed out, shakily, he would not look he would not look he would not. But with no promised future before him and jagged memories behind him, he turned slowly into the sharp moment - he would - towards the unconcealed sound of human grief, towards his brother. Dean almost unrecognizable in this guise; on the bed, elbows digging painful furrows up and down the length of his thighs as he rocked himself, head buried into his hands, his shoulders shaking and the earth beneath Sam's feet shifted and he staggered to his feet.

"Oh," he breathed out, tears melting into his own throat. "Oh, Dean. Dean." Moving through, across, towards his brother. In one two three steps he was there, heavily on the bed beside him and he reached out, wrapped Dean safe and small into his arms. Dean folded himself into his embrace, folded himself down, emptying himself into him, and Sam tightened his hold, pulling him closer, even closer.

Wrapped in two lifetimes, Sam held his brother, rocked him, and murmured the heart's language, words whispered across the top of Dean's head. Hot tears spilled against his breast were warming the skin above his heart, suffusing him, he became frantic. With both hands on Dean's face, he tilted his brother's head upwards until he could bend his own face down and press his mouth hard to Dean's mouth. Kissing him, swallowing grief. Easing.

He pulled back, open-mouthing Dean's face, his eyes, across his brow. "Do not be consoled. But let me comfort you. Let me."

Dean leaned up and kissed the words out of his mouth, nodding, yes, yes, okay. Yes. This.

Sam warmed his hands, one frozen fist inside the other, rubbed his palms hot, and he gently tugged Dean's t-shirt over his head. With reverence, eyes wide open in silent prayer, imploration, he slid off the bed, onto his knees between Dean's thighs. Offered his hands in supplicated gesture, reaching out, and Dean reached down towards him, slid his hands into Sam's open hands, gripped him fiercely and pulled him back into his arms.


End file.
